Critical Play: Florence
Florence, developed by the Australian studio Mountains and directed by Ken Wong, was released in 2018 on iOS, Android, and PC through Annapurna Interactive. The game follows Florence, a 25-year-old woman navigating a routine life in the city, as she falls in love with a cellist named Krish, has her heart broken, and rediscovers her passion for visual art. It is short enough to finish in under an hour and is aimed primarily at adult casual players, or anyone drawn to narrative games that prioritize emotional experience over challenge or competition. In a sense, Florence is a feminist work through its narrative: it tells a story about a woman whose life does not resolve into romantic fulfillment, and whose identity is ultimately defined by her own creative work rather than by the man she loved. Nevertheless, Florence offers minimal player agency, a core element of feminist game design. By stripping away this control, it misses what can make a game a powerful feminist tool: the ability to practice having a voice in any system – game or not.
The feminist case for Florence starts with how the story is shaped. Most romantic narratives, in games and in other media, build toward a climax: the couple gets together, breaks up, or reconciles. Florence doesn’t follow this structure. The relationship with Krish develops and ends, but the game does not treat that as a failure. Florence does not search for a replacement relationship. She picks up her sketchbook, makes new friends, and moves forward on her own terms. The final scene shows her surrounded by her painting, content [fig 1]. “I thought she was going to get back with him at the end,” I noted while playing. “But she didn’t. The game just… let her be okay on her own.” This ending resists the conventional expectation that a woman’s story should revolve around a partner. It positions Florence’s creative identity, not her romantic one, as what matters. This kind of narrative structure, one that doesn’t necessarily escalate toward a single climactic resolution, is feminist in the way Chess describes: it resists what feminist narrative theorist Judith Roof calls the climax-centric, linear arc that has guided storytelling expectations for years.
Fig 1: Florence in the final scene.
But this feminist angle falls short when it comes to the game’s mechanics. The best example can be seen through the conversation puzzle system: as Florence and Krish grow closer, the jigsaw-style dialogue puzzles become simpler, representing how natural conversation gets when you know someone well [fig 2]. It is a clever metaphor. But the player has no control over the pace or outcome. You cannot slow the relationship, resist it, or make a different choice. “The conversation puzzles kept getting easier,” I noticed. “I realized I had no way to slow it down even if I wanted to.” The same holds throughout the game. Players cannot prevent the breakup, redirect Florence’s choices, or explore what her life might look like along a different path. In games like Life is Strange, which also tells a coming-of-age story about a young woman and restricts the player’s ultimate outcomes, the rewind mechanic gives players the experience of weighing decisions, of feeling the weight of choosing differently. That experience of exercising judgment, even within a constrained system, is something Florence does not offer. The player is a witness to Florence’s life rather than a participant in it. Chess argues that games can function as “agentic-training tools,” spaces where players rehearse acting against oppressive systems. This connects to autonomy as described in Self-Determination Theory: the player’s sense that their choices are meaningful. Florence withholds both. A game that reproduces passivity rather than working against it misses what makes the medium uniquely capable as a feminist tool.
Fig 2: jigsaw conversation puzzle mechanic in Florence, showing colorful interlocking pieces.
This is where Florence diverges from what makes games a distinctly powerful medium for feminist expression. Games put players inside systems of choice. Even in scenarios with constrained or domestic-coded mechanics, there is something meaningfully different about doing versus observing. In Diner Dash, a game Chess has written about extensively, built around serving customers and managing tables, the player’s ability to impose order on chaos is itself the point: the satisfaction of control in a system designed to overwhelm. Florence offers no equivalent. During the breakup sequence, the color palette drains to gray, the puzzles grow harder, and the player has nothing to do but tap forward. “I kept tapping, hoping I could do something,” I found myself thinking during this section. “There was nothing. Just the gray.” The game communicates grief effectively, but communicating grief is something novels and films do too. What Florence does not do is give the player any role in Florence’s recovery beyond watching it happen.
A more feminist design would give the final chapter a branching structure: let the player choose what Florence pursues after the breakup, whether that is visual art, music, travel, or solitude. That choice would not change what the game is about. It would naturally let the player participate in it, which is the thing games can do that no other medium can. Compared to Life is Strange, which gives players choices that carry emotional weight even when the outcomes are ultimately fixed, Florence removes the pretense of choice entirely. That is, in some ways, truer to how love actually works, but it closes off the kind of active feminist engagement that makes games distinct.
Florence succeeds as a feminist story and falls short as a feminist game. Its narrative does what Chess argues feminist games should: it refuses the climax-centric arc, positions a woman’s creative identity as what defines her, and doesn’t treat the end of a relationship as a failure. But a game that delivers a feminist story while stripping the player of agency forfeits what Chess argues games uniquely offer: the experience of rehearsing agency, of practicing the will to act. If play is, as Chess argues, a way of training ourselves to act differently in the world, then Florence trains you to observe a woman’s resilience but not to enact it. The strongest feminist games use both tools: a story that reframes what matters, and mechanics that let players experience that reframing from the inside. Florence has the first and stops short of the second.
